Conversion.–Billet-Doux of the Watch.–Crape Hat.

In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,–both contented with a separation which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was–afterthought, or rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor. He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he–as I hope my reader has–discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.–The pupil of Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to quench in tears of mourning her first love.–But Emanuel communicates his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.–She returns unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.–But her good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak with her about Flamin's relationship.–He goes to court, and seems to forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents, either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again, and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting, at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.—Ay, thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!—As, now, Victor thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse, where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his father,–and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a heavenly queen before whom it is easier to kneel down than to embrace her,–and as he further reflected that this noble heart, improved by an Emanuel and worthy of an Emanuel, nevertheless gave itself with all its heavens to the fickle heart of the pupil—and that the good soul could not have even this modest wish fulfilled, because fate delayed the blossoming of her love like that of a rose-bush by transplanting it, by setting it in the shade, by clipping the buds in spring and autumn,–and as he saw that nevertheless this noble one had gone off to Maienthal with her finger on her lips, with her hand on her heavy heart, without a hint of her bitter disappointment, and that moral coldness lifted up this flower, as physical cold does other flowers, but tore from it thereby the roots of life,–and as, finally, his dream on the third Easter-holiday, when it appeared to him as if he saw her rise singing from the earth on a light veil of mist, passed by before him like a great rain-cloud, and the dream with her faded hues paused before his pining soul, and a voice out of the dream asked him, "Wilt thou long continue to love her, when angels yearn for her and lift her out of her sorrow, and leave thee nothing but the grave of the too long misinterpreted heart?"—As all these thoughts, in glowing procession, like mountain chains of ruddy evening clouds, moved around his soul, then was his heart, like an altar, covered by a sacrificial fire falling from heaven, and all his earthly desires, all his stains, were consumed in this fire,–in short, he resolved to amend himself, in order, by virtue, to be worthy of a virtuous woman.

He was converted on the 3d of April, 1793, towards evening; when the moon–and the EARTH–were under his feet in the Nadir.

The reader may have laughed at this chronometer; but every man in whom virtue is anything higher than an accidental water-sucker and wood-shoot, must be able to tell the hour wherein she became the Hamadryad of his inner being,–which the theologians call conversion and the Moravians the breaking-through. Why should not time mark off our spiritual sensations, when in fact it is only they that mark off its periods?

There is–or comes–in every man who is more solar than planetary, a lofty hour when his heart, amidst violent commotions and painful rendings, at last, by a lifting-up, suddenly turns round towards virtue, in an indescribable transition like that in which man lifts himself over from one system of faith to another, or, suddenly, from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness of all faults;–that lofty hour, the birth-hour of the virtuous life, is also its sweetest hour, because it is to man as if his oppressive body were taken off from him; because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself no contradictions; because all his chains fall; because he fears nothing more in the awfully sublime universe.–The spectacle is great, when the angel is born in man; when, thereafter, on the horizon of earth, the whole solar warmth of virtue falls upon his heart unobstructed by a cloud.

But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, immersed in blood, encased in flesh, soon feels the difference between his raptures and his powers; he who was going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to march against its giants (the passions). I do not, however, reject even the extravagance of that enthusiasm; Man, like buildings, must be screwed up into the air, in order to be rebuilt; a syllogism does not lead off the blood streams of our desires. It is singular that the devil in us must have alone the right to spend blood, nerves, beverage, passions, upon his military operations and for his imperial treasury, but the angel not....

So it is, however; men are vicious, because they look upon virtue as too hard, and they again become so, because they held it easier than it is. Not reason (i. e. conscience) makes us good: that is the outstretched wooden arm on the road to virtue; but this arm can neither draw nor drive us thither,–reason has the legislative, not the executive force. The power of loving these commandments, the still greater power of giving one's self up to them, is a second conscience by the side of the first; and as Kant cannot indicate with ink that which makes man bad, so neither can that be set forth which keeps his heart upright above moral filth or lifts it out of it.

Who can explain the fact, if there are men who, from youth up, either possess or do without a certain sense of honor,–in the female sex this line of division is still sharper and more important,–if there are men who, from youth up either experience or forever live without a certain yearning for the super-earthly, for religion, for the nobler principle in man (and for systems which seal this nobler quality instead of disputing it)?—(With children a warm feeling for religion is often a sign of genius.) Man does not become good (though he does grow better) because he is converted, but he gets converted because he is good.

Were virtue nothing but stoicism, then it were a mere child of reason, whereas it is at the highest her foster-daughter. Stoicism represents virtue as so useful, so reasonable, that it is nothing more than a conclusion; it gives one nothing to conquer but errors. As (according to the stoical principle) it is, not the highest, but the only good,–as, according to that principle, all desires aim at an empty nothing–it follows that virtue is no merit, but a necessity. E. g. if there is nothing odious: then love and the victory over anger towards an enemy are not harder or more meritorious than towards a friend, but all one.

What then has the Stoic to sacrifice to Virtue according to his notion, but mock-goods, air-castles, and fever-images? Nevertheless Stoicism renders Virtue, as criticism does genius, negative services; the stoical chill calls forth no spring, but it destroys the insects which gnaw it; the stoical winter, like the physical, removes the pestilence, ere the warmer months come, which bring new life....

Although Victor said: "Thou dear one, no heart can be pure, still, tender, and great enough for thine, but the weak one which thou endurest will sanctify itself through thine and come to thee improved"; still mere love was not the source of his virtue, but the reverse was the case, only virtue could manifest itself by such a love. But even without taking that, into account, a half-selfish change of purpose becomes by action a disinterested one, as the love which starts from beauty of face ennobles itself at last into love for beauty of soul.

His separation from Clotilda gave him joy in the thought that so long as it lasted he should spare the delusions of her jealous brother. General love now led the way to friendship for the better sort of women, and tolerance toward the worse. He annulled his satirical intolerance–which, however, was not half so great as that of young wags of authors–by toleration-mandates of his own. He read Gulliver's last journey into Horse-land (Houynheim), as a recipe against lying when one goes to court. His Kubach^[52] and jewel-casket and his collegium pietatis consisted of three dissimilar volumes,–Kant, Jacobi, and Epictetus.

I could wish, however, that he would not make himself ridiculous. Of a man who had been nine months at court, one was surely justified in expecting that he would behave differently, and not offend against that equality of ranks and of vices; as men practise sins best in common, as in Swiss churches the hearers must cough simultaneously, or as recruits on their march must make water at the same time. At least, the well-bred man seeks to conceal his love for his religion, as well as that for his wife.–I return to the story.

Victor determined now to make only visits that annoyed himself and pleased his neighbor. The first was an extraordinary tribute of a visit to the Princess (for his daily portioning-tax^[53] of calls on her now ceased). To be sure, the thick hour-watch of old Bee-father Lind was every minute an alarm-clock to hold up before him his former foolhardy jokes, his watch-enclosure, and love-letter to Agnola. I cannot avoid the apprehension that the reader may make a slip, and not dream with what heart Sebastian went to the Princess;–O, with one full of dumb apologies and–exculpations, with a distended breast full of proud confidence, and yet full of sympathetic mildness. Whence came this?–It came from the fair soul which now, reconciled and filled up with another's love, could wish nothing more but friendship, and which was now too happy to be inexorable. But he found in her apartment two cold, refined faces, which it is quite as hard to apologize to as to forgive,–namely, her own and that of Count von O. from Kussewitz, in whose house her transfer had taken place. Victor blushed; the Count appeared not to have the least knowledge of him,–they were not introduced to each other,–but talked together as genially as if they had been (especially as it made no difference),–and so, with cold feelings, and with the greatest indifference about their own and each other's anonymousness, they politely separated. Only Victor afterward worried himself with doubts whether lie had not sooner than Agnola called the unknown Count by that title.

For the rest, he now, for the first time since he had loved Clotilda, found the partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible and very thick: before that he could see through the partition-wall well enough. A woman cannot choose for herself a firmer or purer friend than another woman's lover.

Victor must now also, and for still more urgent reasons, visit Joachime. The evil spirit, which, like the youngest councillors, always gives its voice first in man, made the motion that "he should indulge Joachime in the slight illusion of believing that he loved her."–As this did not pass, the filou^[54] took another voice, and proposed that "he should punish her for her former ambiguity by the most unambiguous signs of his hatred."–But he followed willingly the good spirit which led him by the hand, and said on the way, "Go now to her,–disengage thyself from her without giving her any pain,–let thy hand glide gradually out of hers, and clear one finger after another, as maidens do with their natural hand, and assume the attitude neither of her enemy nor of her lover." He went to her house without any selfish consideration; for the latter would rather have prompted him to stay at home, and enjoy and turn over the leaves of the past and future, or else to quit the house and go to St. Luna, to sit down by Agatha beside the crape hat of Clotilda which she was studying.

In order, however, not to let his visit have too much weight in the eyes of Joachime, he proposed to himself to beg of her for some weeks the views of Maienthal, which hung in her room. O Maienthal, how much thou must have, if the very sketch of thee makes one so happy!–But his visit turned out singularly. He wished on the way that he might find in her toilette-chamber the fine fool and the fragrant fool and more stuff;–there was nothing there. She received him with a careless gayety, as if she were the Columbine^[55] and the Medicus the clown. He, however, was going merely to execute the gradual weakening or diminuendo of his moral dissonances; therefore he became, by his constant looking off at his note-stand, and at the score of his inner harmony, somewhat stiff and awkward in his playing. Women easily distinguish the coldness of reason (if only by the very want of extravagance) from coldness of mood. Now he asked for the views. Joachime did not grow cooler, but warm, i. e. serious, and lifted up her watch in the hollow of her hand, and said, looking at it, "I give you as many minutes' grace as you have stayed away days, to excuse your staying away." Victor accepted without embarrassment–like every one who acts only according to one, either good or bad, principle–the allowed time for decision, and took the montre'e À rÉgulateur from under the looking-glass, that Joachime might not cheat him. This cursed watch of the Princess grinned at him everywhere, like a percussion-ball and powder-mine under his feet. He wound it up just to have a chance to open this Nuremberg egg (as they used to call watches), and finally for once to examine whether the love-declaration, i. e. the punctum saliens of love, or the Cupid,–who also, according to Plato, came out of an egg,–was still in there. "I know well enough–he said to himself–it has been gone this long time, but I'll just try it."

There might have been, indeed, a question whether it was the same watch, as the one in Tostato's shop had no diamonds,–had there not come fluttering out from this Pandora's box, so soon as it was opened at the window, a little thin piece of paper half as big as a butterfly's wing, and as long as the stamen of a tulip.–The little leaf took flight at every breath of wind.—Joachime caught the thing,–read the thing,–found the declaration of love still there,–took it for one which he was just making to herself, by way of atoning for his absence, and which, for the sake of the wit (he might allude to its heart-shape), he had been trying to incorporate into the watch....

Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.–He would have got through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,–of which a single one may, as a liquor probatorius, leave behind in the remaining mass confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside from the mark,–that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,–a habit on the Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an Isaac with a ram, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither could he bring himself even to this, to sacrifice Joachime for the sake of saving her, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a sweet-billet (billet-doux) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to another lady.

He told her right out plainly what he was,–a fool. He narrated the whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime ill a state which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated women in a fine, proud exaltation, and with uncultivated ones in the attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek artists did to their models,–namely, with the finger-nails. Victor took his leave with two very different sorts of views, those of the future and those of Maienthal.–

She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope, this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an oath before Heaven that one will be good;–-but a single sacrifice steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential sermons.

I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime; but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can now–despite all my efforts to the contrary–allege the gift as a sign of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of love in other quarters.

Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal; Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the famous Count von BrÜhel^[56] watched, like a mother, around his master from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout. This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers, economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a buckle or a Titus's-head.^[57] Sebastian appeared to people much too waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the article of physicians–as in every main article of property or of life–the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most dangerous transfers of maladies by an easy transfer of the patient? I might appeal to the refugiÉs from this world, whether our sandbox and inkstand (the implements of our receipts) are not the sowing-machine and waterpot of the winter-crop of humanity; but the survivors shall speak and answer whether, for the benefices, the regiments, the estates in fee, the order-ribbons, which fall to them, they have not to thank our recipes and Uriah's-letters, and whether they or even kings would sit high and dry, without our frequent ditching and draining in the churchyard.–And yet, methinks, our renown in the way of healing and bringing to life is quite as great, if not greater; this glory–as well as the lists of mortality on which it is based–has remained for many centuries the same,–our theories, specifics, judgments, may change as they will."

Such satires made the Prince right merry and incredulous. Dr. Culpepper, on the contrary, stood upon his dignity, and would have drawn his sword against a satirist who had talked of the slow decimation of physicians, and by a swifter one have completely refuted him. I advise every one who wants to be anything in the world (that is anything different from what he is) to appear among men as a funeral-bidder,–with women, as a godfather-bidder.–The Prince in the sickly spring held himself, for two reasons, to be possessed with the gout again: first, because I have never yet known a nervous weakling who, when I had talked a disease out of him in summer, did not the next sickly winter get it into his head again; secondly, because January calculated that he had fallen on his knee before ladies often enough to feel the traces of his adoration still lingering in the shape of gonagra or knee-gout.

So stood matters, when a little accident made our Victor happy again. Only I must say beforehand that, independently of that, he was not at all unhappy: for a lover never worries himself about anything, certainly not about a court; he has on Cupid's bandage, and willingly forgives Fortune and Justice theirs. And the moral Easter-eve bonfire melted–just as superstition ascribes to the physical one a peculiar power–all the ice wherewith they dammed up Victor's blood into the lymph of joy; the Easter-wind–which, according to the weather-prophets, continues till Whitsuntide–set his old joy-flowers in motion, and wafted forth from them the pollen of future ones; the snow dissolved on the hot spring awaking from its winter sleep, and the first flowers and the thousand buds gave all hearts energies and hopes and love. O when Victor looked out of doors toward the green-growing path which, with fresh sap-colors, (for in spring the foot-paths grow green first,) would fain lure and lead him out of the midst of the after-grass heath to the Eden of Maienthal,–and then when he turned round glowing and thirsting, and ran over into the sketched Maienthal, into the borrowed views, and there climbed every colored mountain, and encircled every dotted-out garden with his fingers and fancies,–then he did not think himself that a little accident could make him still more joyous.–And yet it did.

It is not well done of me that I always–and it is a thing I have become very much accustomed to in this biography–call that an accident which is a direct great-grandchild by blood of former chapters, and which really must come. For the crape hat–that was the accident–must indeed come, because it was bespoken. It was, however, the–original itself. Besides, in so small a time no hat could have been made by the nimblest master-builder of finery; and yet Sebastian never would have thought, had not traces of powder and opened lace-lattices compelled him, to distinguish the old hat from a new one. In short, Clotilda had given it to Agatha, who could not conceal from her for whom she was taking the copy, before the third Easter-holiday, for the purpose of letting her copy it, and after the aforesaid day had written to her to send her the copy and pass off the original upon the Medicus for the imitation, (as in the case of the wax-statue,)–and why, perhaps?–O, of that her friend had a sweet consciousness; she was sorry that she could not give a shy, delicate heart anything, not a sound, nor a glance, nor a joy, nor a reminiscence of the fairest evening, except its mere autumnal after-flora, mere silk-flowers sewed together in imitation of that flower of joy, the taffeta shadow of a taffeta-shade.... No, she did violence to herself, in order to give the mute darling at least more than a copy of the shadow. O, if the loving, closed heart of a good woman should open before a man, how much controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!

–One must, at any rate, with the German Diet and its cross-benches; make no mystery of the fact, that Victor would not accept the ninth Electoral hat, or in fact the eighth and last, on condition of parting with the crape hat.... What can the thickest, heaviest crowns, said he, which have been exhibited to me in my travels, weigh in the one scale,–even supposing one should throw in also several tiaras and doges' caps with bows and papal hats,–if Clotilda's crape hat weighs down the other? As the reader has quite as much intelligence as I, let him decide the question.–This hat gave him an inexpressible longing for Maienthal, and was to him a dedicatory copper-plate which (as by an investitura per pileum) first presented Clotilda to him; he stood before this crown as an heir to the crown–every minute drew his coronation-chariot–with two big drops of joy, which the happy eye could not hold, and said slowly, gently shaking his head: "No, kind destiny gives me too much.–Ah, how can I deserve this soul from heaven?–I will merely say to her, I am thine! and by and by, some day, Thou art mine!" And when his fancy actually opened behind the crape-latticework the two great eyes which had once concealed behind it the tears of a rejected heart, and when he let the remote voice discourse again out of shadowy threads behind this nunnery-grating, then he could no longer restrain himself from writing,–so that he might thus go to Maienthal,–as he sat opposite the hat, his first letter to her, which I shall certainly get from the dog by to-morrow evening's post.–

I believe I have not yet said that Agatha handed him the hat, and that she invited him–it is now towards the end of April–to the birthday of her father on the 4th of May. Victor thought on the melancholy 4th of May of the year '92, and grew still more full of yearning for the friend who was torn from him.

Before closing the chapter, I will only say to the younger Clotildas, the Vice-Clotildas, the illegitimate Clotildas, and the Counter-Clotildas, who have me and my chapters in their laps: Be cool. You cannot possibly carry the coldness of virtue too far, unless you absolutely set no limits to it. I will, on your account, dress up this doctrine in wise sayings and witty sentences, that it may be the better adapted to fans and albums.

Love, like the seed of the Auricula, must be sown on snow; both are warmed through by ice itself, and then spring up so much the more vigorously.–You must never give yourselves as a mere present, but as a lady's acknowledgment of thanks to her knight.–You receive and deserve exactly as much respect as you demand, and you can, though you should be alloyed as much as you pleased, take your mint-die or coin-stamp out of your pocket and coin yourselves therewith as a lady d'or for one gentleman, or as a miserable little fat-mannikin^[58] for another.–A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the purity of the air, by the different degrees of his boldness, the different degrees of female merit, only in inverse relation....

Even if it did not belong to the female point of honor, one must still desire, merely for the sake of having one trouble more,–because, my sex thinks on this subject entirely with me, who desire a daughter from no recruiting-house of sons-in-law, where at least the parents have not something against me;–and let it hereby be known (therefore I do not insert it in the newspaper) that I expect of parents, who in their auction-room of daughters, in their love-inoculation-hospital, have one or two subjects to dispose of, and to whom a Mining-Superintendent, Justice, Music-Master, and Biographer–such may be my few offices–is no too contemptible match,–that I [I repeat] expect of such parents, that (if they mean the thing seriously) they will at least forbid me the house or frequent correspondence:–that enlivens sons-in-law.

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